NVIDIA® Quadro FX1800

Conclusions and Award

We have now concluded over the last few months the complete Quadro Range and the card which keeps popping its head up is that of the Quadro FX3800.  NVIDIA most certainly have completed their homework here as it is an exceptional piece of engineering.  But, and there always is, what of the future.  Many rumours' are firing about - but what to believe.  That is difficult to put to print.   All we can say from this location, is watch these spaces very closely and all will be unveiled.

This is a mighty contender indeed and demonstrates amazing stable power in many areas.  Therefore for those loyal followers of the Quadro FX range looking for that move up a level then this is without a doubt your route to go. to summarise quickly the differences between the Quadro FX1700 and Quadro FX1800 they are;

Currently the stand alone pricing of the Quadro FX1800 is approximately £350.00 (or for those in EU land €370 Euro's) before Taxes and shipping.     For some and there are a few, this is a touch too much, for others a reasonable price point for a professional graphics card of this nature.  Therefore if in doubt, shop around and find out.  Ultimately and the end point is that it is down to individual choice, as we have this option now right across the board.

One point of note is that of the clever cooling array built into the Quadro FX1800.   For those who have a supplied chassis that has a good intake fan then the aerodynamic front of the card most certainly will make use of that cool air coming in.

The plethora of benchmarks available in this arena; one could spend all day in producing results if the time permitted, paralysis by analysis!  In order to make this a factual hard hitting article we looked carefully at what the community really need  to see, many now have their own in house tests.  Before moving forward with these in house tests they still rely heavily upon the industries professional benchmarks that the good people at SPEC take so much time to produce.

Previous results obtained were from the exact same 64-bit system.   Performance within all the tests for this article have been interesting indeed and actually demonstrate on how much influence a new driver set can impact on the cards overall performance within certain tests and applications.  Several we see going up,  as in Cinebench were we see clear improvement in the OpenGL performance,  others - drop which does seem to be the case within SPECviewperf® 10 results.   However with SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™ we have witnessed a substantial leap forward in the performance of the final result output.

Overall the Quadro FX1800 has performed very well indeed throughout and, in the correct hands an extremely powerful piece of equipment that will keep the mid range end-user going for some time to come.   For those wishing to upgraded from their old Quadro FX1700 without a doubt this is a smart move as the benefits from the new architecture is very significant indeed.  If we take into consideration triple the memory bandwidth and double the CUDA Parallel  Processor Cores, this certainly is a extensive improvement upon its predecessor.   What we have to take into account is that these cards (Quadro FX1800 and Quadro FX3800) are the mainstay bread and butter winners for NVIDIA and they do this job very well indeed.

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Card Pictures
Page 3 - System Build, System Set-Up and Software Used
Page 4 - SiSoftware Sandra 2009 SP4 64-bit GPU/Video Tests
Page 5 - Bentley MicroStation Benchmark and POV-Ray Ver. 3.7 beta 34 64-bit
Page 6 - Cinebench 10 64-bit
Page 7 - Autodesk 3DS Max 2009 Scenes
Page 8 - SPECviewperf® 10 and SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™
Page 9 - Conclusions and Award